All about us lay the bodies of dead people, scores of
them--old men, young men, women, children, little babies at the breast
--there they lay among the burnt huts, pierced with assegai wounds.
Red was the earth with their blood, and red they looked in the red
light of the setting sun. It was as though all the land had been
smeared with the bloody hand of the Great Spirit, of the Umkulunkulu.
Baleka saw it and began to cry; she was weary, poor girl, and we had
found little to eat, only grass and green corn.
"An enemy has been here," I said, and as I spoke I thought that I
heard a groan from the other side of a broken reed hedge. I went and
looked. There lay a young woman: she was badly wounded, but still
alive, my father. A little way from her lay a man dead, and before him
several other men of another tribe: he had died fighting. In front of
the woman were the bodies of three children; another, a little one,
lay on her body. I looked at the woman, and, as I looked, she groaned
again, opened her eyes and saw me, and that I had a spear in my hand.
"Kill me quickly!" she said. "Have you not tortured me enough?"
I said that I was a stranger and did not want to kill her.
"Then bring me water," she said; "there is a spring there behind the
kraal."
I called to Baleka to come to the woman, and went with my gourd to the
spring.
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